GREEN BAY, Wis. — Ultimately, the Bears’ 21-13 loss to Green Bay on Sunday afternoon ended the same way their 2019 season will: too little, too late. To that end, coming up one yard short against the Packers seemed more than fitting.
“Really big picture is that we don’t get the win,” Matt Nagy said. “We could have played better in really all three phases. You could point to a lot of different things, but I’m going to stay positive with our guys because I appreciate their fight.”
The loss played out like much of their season, with the offense spending the entirety of the first half searching for any type of spark. The Bears went into the locker room with three points and 115 net yards of offense – 36 on the ground and 79 through the air. They were 0-1 in the red zone, committed two penalties, and started drives deep in their own territory. Tarik Cohen had the same amount of receptions (3) as Anthony Miller (2) and Allen Robinson (1) combined. It was the familiar brand of disjointed, dysfunctional offense that’s held them back countless times throughout the once-promising campaign.
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“We’ve felt that in each of our games,” Cohen said after the loss. “The offense has kind of taken too long to get things rolling. It’s kind of been the same thing. If you magnify it with the season, we took too long to get everything going.”
“We had some penalties, we had some times we didn’t capitalize on first down,” Allen Robinson added. “I thought the first possession, we started off 2nd-and-4, but we didn’t keep that up over the course of the game.”
Then, like clockwork, the Bears showed up in the second half and looked like a team that had won three straight games and had their sights firmly set on a playoff push. After finishing the first half with nine receiving yards, Allen Robinson had eight catches for 116 yards in the final 30 minutes; he now has topped 1,000 yards for only the second time in his career. Anthony Miller hauled in seven more balls for 79 yards, including the Bears’ only touchdown against Green Bay all season. The running game was abandoned in the second half, which is about the only place this comparison fails (though when you’re down 21-3 late in the game, can you really blame them?).
It all culminated on the Bears’ final play of the game, an intricate prayer full of weaves and backwards passes that, for about nine yards, looked like the type of miraculous, season-saving touchdown that can breath new life into a team. Instead, Jesper Horsted – who was a distant practice squad footnote when these teams met in Week 1 – couldn’t find Allen Robinson with one final lateral, and now the Bears are stuck asking what-if. Sound familiar?
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“I had my eyes on the inside where the ball was coming from,” Horsted explained. “I was focused on would I be running with it or blocking, and then I got the ball, and the first thing I looked downfield and I saw a little bit of daylight, but I knew that I had a guy on the outside.”
“In hindsight I should have gotten there a little bit earlier, but it was moving quickly and it was a little bit hard to see exactly what was going on to the right when I was focusing on straight and left.”
There figures to be a lot of hindsight the next two weeks and throughout the offseason for this team.